Now IMS uses real-time data to keep citizens safe in crowded places

Managing security at large events, public places, and institutions
requires wrangling a lot of logistics. And data. Lots of real-time data
— from users, social media, sensors, and applications. Now IMS, an
incident management platform built by a four-person team in Houston,
Texas, is modernizing event security by replacing paper-based systems
and spreadsheets with an intelligent, centralized security command
center. The goal: Use data to proactively keep people safe.

After the team launched their platform on Google Cloud, Chief Architect Jeremy Lorino shared how they built and power Now IMS.

Featured Products

Scaling Now IMS with Google Cloud has meant faster innovation and a better customer experience

Our initial architecture used Java, Postgres, and Redis for the
backend service communicating with a PHP frontend application. Before
we moved to Google Cloud Platform, we were hosting using another
cloud provider for file storage of photos and documents, but we
wanted to scale more quickly and easily. We heard feedback that the
original system did what customers needed, but not everything they
wanted.

When we realized what we were sacrificing as we grew was customer experience, it was clear we needed a lighter stack that allowed us to shift our focus back to what matters most.

We decided to upgrade our stack, taking into account not just the
platform we were building but also how we were building it. After
looking at several providers, Google Cloud was the clear winner for our
needs. Because of the size of our team and the nature of our platform,
pricing, services, and support are important to us. In addition to the
ongoing level of support we were provided, we found Google’s ecosystem
to be the best, making it easy to integrate many services without
overburdening our process or weighing down our stack.

Reference architecture

swipe to reveal

Rather than worrying about servers or load balancers, we can now focus on the fun stuff: user requirements and writing and deploying code. We let Google Cloud worry about the less fun stuff.

John Rodkey

Co-Founder, Now IMS

Letting user experience drive development with an available, integrated cloud system

Cloud Functions is now our preferred workhorse. With that as our glue, we can integrate other fully-managed services, like Cloud Firestore, that help make sure our systems are always available. We listen for change events as data is persisted or updated in Cloud Firestore, perform nightly backups, or feed data to BigQuery for analysis. Google Cloud Platform also integrates with the other tools we’re using like Angular, Mailgun, Trello, and Bitbucket.

The result is a fast, scalable, and fault-tolerant system backed by a secure, world-class service. The time it takes to develop and deliver has been reduced by an order of magnitude.

With Cloud Functions, we’ve also been able to adopt a serverless/microservice paradigm, giving us the flexibility to focus more on our customers’ experiences and delivering features, rather than server management and patching. Without having to manage additional widgets, we’ve been able to let user experience drive our development — from tracking new social media feeds to adding video analytics.

When customers ask us to track public social media shares around an event, we’re able to leverage tools like Cloud Dataprep and BigQuery to capture related social posts and provide fast analytic insight. Our engine can track events on social media and supports even more teams’ efforts to raise awareness of, or even prevent, critical incidents.

In recent years, Now IMS added enhancements that allowed us to prioritize events, add comprehensive follow up, and push out live advisories faster, helping us deal with local and national-level news events including the Super Bowl in Minneapolis and the International Games in London.

David Burrus

Security Manager, National Football League

The National Football League’s security teams were able to communicate with local resources, law enforcement, and government agencies faster than previous years. We’ve had the flexibility to focus on the new features the NFL needs because of the nimble, iterative way of working that Google Cloud Platform supports.

The Google Cloud Startup Program enables any startup to get up and running quickly and easily through mentorship, training, and free credits.
Learn more.